New racism, intercultural romance, and the immigration question in contemporary Spanish cinema

Abstract

As a response to the dramatic changes in migratory patterns experienced in Spain in the last twenty years, Spanish cultural productions on the topic of current immigration reveal less about the real lives of the newcomers and more about Spain’s anxiety regarding its own liminal location in Europe. This paper analyses how Spanish immigration films, through a narrative plot of a failed intercultural romance, become complicit with the assumptions of differentialist racism, i.e. with the fear of racial/cultural contagion and intermixing, even when striving to show positive images of immigrants. Examples are drawn from the films Las cartas de Alou (Armendáriz, 1990), Bwana (Uribe, 1996), Said (Soler, 1998), Poniente (Gutiérrez, 2002) and especially Tomándote (Gardela, 2000) and Susanna (Chavarrías, 1997).